“Turn left at the big metal buffalo,” the clerk at the motel said. “You can’t miss it.”

She was right, of course. You head south on U.S. 83 through these heartland fields, and there’s no way you can miss it. The huge bronze buffalo stands amid the spring wheat and has a startled look on its face. This, in all likelihood, is because he is being shot in the buttocks region by a huge bronze Buffalo Bill Cody.

The monument in this small town celebrates the fact that Cody earned his nickname here, just over the hill. (Although this is Kansas, and perhaps hill is too strong a word.) Legend has it that Cody became Buffalo Bill in 1868 after he gunned down more buffalo in a shooting contest than rival Buffalo Bill Comstock.

All of which has nothing to do with this story other than this: By turning left at the big metal buffalo, you come upon the Fick Fossil and History Museum, founded in 1974 by Vi and Earnest Fick.

To get here, you have crossed the vast Eastern Plains of Colorado and then plunged some 60 miles into Kansas, driving past so many amber waves of grain that you’ve started to feel seasick. You have come to the Fick museum to see its most acclaimed exhibit ever: the history of fences.

And sure, you come with a smidge of cynicism. You wonder what will follow the history-of-fences exhibit. Perhaps “Buttons Through the Ages”? Or “The World of Bookmarks”?

Which is, as it turns out, silly. According to museum director Janet Bean, the museum already has had both the button and bookmark exhibits.

But the fence exhibit, well, the fence exhibit comes to Kansas from the Smithsonian Institution, part of its traveling Museum on Main Street project. Which makes it much more important than, say, a recent Fick museum exhibit featuring, according to director Bean, “all kinds of things with strawberries on them.”

The current exhibit is called “Between Fences.” The Smithsonian says it “weaves the history of fences into the story of America. Whether it is barbed wire, white picket, post rock, split rail, electric wire or patio privacy fence, America’s fascination with fences is evident along any highway, county road or city street.”

There are other fences too. Take the worm fence, with its stacked-rail sections and overlapping ends built in a zigzag pattern. In the 1870s, we’re told, the worm fence was so popular that Department of Agriculture commissioner Horace Capron called it “America’s fence.”

Also still dotting our landscape are the palisade fence, the post-and-rail fence and the split rail. And, of course, an actual fence called the spite fence, whose intention is not to keep out intruders or keep in cattle, but, in its purest and simplest form, to anger or “spite” a neighbor. (Historical footnote: In the modern world, the spite fence largely has been replaced by buying your teenage son a set of drums or, in extreme cases, bagpipes.)

Bean, who applied for the Smithsonian exhibit through the Kansas Humanities Council in 2005 and was notified of the Fick museum’s acceptance in spring 2006, can hardly contain herself. “I couldn’t believe we were lucky enough to be chosen,” she said.

The exhibit also has visited the Kansas towns of Lucas, Wamego, Winfield, Paola and Larned. Like Oakley, the other five are very small towns nestled among the wheat and corn.

“Mostly, we exhibit local collectors,” Bean said. “People from right here in Oakley bring things in. With the bookmark exhibit, we displayed about 2,000 of them. The woman who collected them had way more than that, but we just didn’t have room for any more.”

She looked through her office doorway and out into the museum – which is small and shares a building with the town library – and motioned toward the fence displays.

“But this,” she said. “Well, this is the Smithsonian.”

The museum has been averaging 200 more people a week than normal. Most of the visitors, she said, are Kansans.

“Fences” ends its run Aug. 5. And the Fick museum will once again turn to townsfolk for help.

“Last year, we had an exhibit of things with chickens on them,” Bean said. “My favorite was a rooster cookie jar that crowed when you took its head off.”

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